Our main competitor is/was doing some Black Hat tactics....
-
Our main competitor Royal Cases, a custom case manufacturer and designer, has some really shady links and some dummy domains with duplicate content, yet they are ranking #1 organically for some of the industry's top search terms. Let me give you some examples.
First off, they have multiple dummy domains with the same exact same content as their main website. One of these is casescasescases.net. They have a couple more that are just as bad.
Secondly, their link profile is so shockingly black hat, I can't figure out why/how they haven't been deindexed or hit with a filter. I'll give you some examples. I ran a link analysis through Moz, and found multiple links from many websites that have absolutely NOTHING to do with custom cases. Here are a few of the linking domains: http://moneysourceonline.com/ ; www.lemons2lemonade.com/ ; http://jenaesboutique.com/ ; These are just a few. Now here is what I don't understand, when I go to explore the individual inbound links, I can't find the links to Royal anywhere on the pages. They have dozens from different pages on these obviously completely unrelated websites, but when you go to those pages, the links themselves are nowhere to be found. Yet, they are showing up as inbound links....I am lost.
Does anyone have any idea what in the world is going on here? Is there a way to report this to Google? Normally I wouldn't resort to this sort of "tattle-tailing" but this company has a history of scheming and just horrendous business practices, and they recently had to pay a large settlement for pirating software for their company.
-
Karma will Kome
-
We don't necessarily know what Google is "rewarding" them for. Organic rankings are sometimes not fair, but we just need to work at what believe will benefit us in the long-term. It's frustrating, labor-intensive and difficult. However, that is why it is also rewarding.
I see where Chris is coming from though, in the respect that (I believe) in focusing attention on creating sites with value as opposed to spending efforts elsewhere (he knows his stuff).
Good luck!
-
Now is there anything that can be done to report webmasters engaging in black hat seo? Would you guys even report it? Has anyone had any success reporting webspam to Google?
-
um–hum
-
??? I am confused by your response. I am not building links to my competitor, I am simply trying to figure out why Google has all of these golden rules of what not to do, but yet rewards the websites that use those black hat tactics with high organic rankings. I assure you, I take my job very seriously and I work very hard to make sure I am doing things the right way to get my business ahead of the competition. I reached out to the community of Moz for some insights, you don't need to be so condescending.
-
Further proof that black hat tactics work and work well. And they always will work. Google still can't really determine the quality of a link, whether it's natural, negative SEO, spam, etc.
-
So scheming and poor business practices makes your resorting to "tattle tailing" OK? I don't follow that logic. You're probably better off working on building new relationships for your own site than building links to your competitor.
-
"First off, they have multiple dummy domains with the same exact same content as their main website".
One of my competitors has been doing this exact thing and have been rewarded by ranking well in Google. I don't even think reporting web spam to Google even works. I can't understand how they haven't been deindexed or penalized for this.
-
Hahah I found that amusing as well. I guess they are just ranking because of their age...I just dont see why they are so high up with such a crappy website, bogus links, and so much duplicate content.
-
Am I the only one here that finds it hilarious that bsa.org gives companies that pirate software a followed link? Oh man, that is rich. The giggles keep coming.
It's an expensive link, but maybe your company should turn itself in for piracy?
They're only shooting themselves in the foot with the duplicate content.
The site's link profile doesn't look 'shockingly' black hat, though there are some shady spots. It looks like a lot of the newer links were made because the site was scraped. I've found quite a few, at random, that redirect to some Chinese ccTLD. That might be one of the reasons you can't find the link.
Besides, even crap links can possibly prop up a domain for a little while. (Not recommended) But a site may eventually get hit, or it will drop a bit after new low quality links ebb.
Maybe you just don't have the domain age... there's a bunch of things.
-
The links may have just been removed. Also, there rankings may/may not been influence by these tactics (they been around since 1998). As you know, many factors matter in organic ranking. You can make a report of webspam at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are the best free/low cost tools you use for SEO?
Hello! I will be giving a talk next month about free/low cost SEO tools and apps and I would like to hear what your favorite/most useful tools are. I know this question has been discussed here before, but this is a topic that is constantly evolving and I am interested in knowing what people currently find to be the best. I'd like to hear about things you really use on a regular basis--there are a lot of things out there that sound cool, but end up not being used. So, what are your go-to free SEO tools? Thank-you,
Moz Pro | | Linda-Vassily
Linda0 -
Social pages not lining up with my website/listing
Hi! Newbie here... 🙂 On my Moz report and I have been told that my social sites are not lining up with my webpage. Any tips on getting this done? Also on my Moz Analytic report, I've added my social sites but only facebook is coming up... Any tips would be appreciated!!! Thanks!
Moz Pro | | fullerton0 -
Noindex/nofollow on blog comments; is it good or bad ?
Hi, I changed the design of one my wordpress website at the beginning of the month. I also added a "facebook seo comments" plugin to rewrite facebook comments as normal comments. As most of the website comments are facebook comments, I went from 250 noindex/nofollow comments to 950; URL's are ?replytocom=4822 etc. Moz campaign noticed it and I'm asking myself : is it good to have comments in noindex/nofollow ? Should I do something about this ? Erwan.
Moz Pro | | johnny1220 -
Competitor Adwords Keyword Analysis
Hi everyone, My company is exploring moving into a new industry, and I'm struggling a bit with where to start regarding adwords / keywords. I'm wondering if you have any recommendations regarding a tool for analyzing what others in the space are using for keywords in Adwords (preferably including some detail regarding CPC, volume, etc...). There appear to be several options (both free and paid). I'm just looking for what you'd consider a good product (whether paid or otherwise). Thanks in advance and greatly appreciate any insight you may have. Best, Jason
Moz Pro | | ba_seomoz1 -
So noob while adding competitors, why i can't add sub-directory or specific url?
I try to add my competitors but failed, but there is only sub domain we can add to competitors, so how can i add a sub-directory or specific url to my competitors?
Moz Pro | | lfproseo0 -
URLs getting re-directed to double http:// URLs
The "Notices" section under "Crawl Diagnostics" shows that there are 435 issues on my website. I checked out a few URLs to verify this issue and found that most of these pages are working perfectly. For instance, the above mentioned report shows that http://policycomplaints.com/about redirects to http://http://policycomplaints.com/about/ . Then, http://policycomplaints.com/aegon-religare/mis-selling-of-policy-by-aegon-religare/ redirects to http://http://policycomplaints.com/aegon-religare/mis-selling-of-policy-by-aegon-religare/ . However, when I open these pages, they seem to be working perfectly. I didn't find them getting re-directed to somewhere else. So, as per the report, it seems that all of these 435 http://URLs are getting re-directed to http://http://URL versions which in reality is not true because all the http://URLs are working perfectly. So, is this a problem with SEOmoz software? If not, what is the reason for these issues and how can I adddress them. Do notify if any further information is required for the same. Thanks. bNiEm.png
Moz Pro | | unknownID10 -
Campaigns - domains / sub domains
Dear SEOmoz folk, At the moment, I have one (rather large) site set up as a campain. I have decided to split off parts of my site into sub domains. My question is, can I set up these sub domains as a completely separate campaign on here? I'd very much like the crawl reports separated out for each one. A very real fear I have is that my site is well over double 10,000 pages, so I never truly see the actual number of errors that I have. Thoughts appreciated. Many thanks, Matt
Moz Pro | | Horizon0 -
What is the difference between followed/no followed/ internal/ external links? And how do i improve them?
Am on a beginner level of SEO and as a pro member when i ran a report for my site i found some basic terms used. Can anyone please let me know what exactly is the difference between these terms and how important are they and how do i improve them?. or please let me know a source to find out.
Moz Pro | | NikhilM0